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3 July 2012

Fantasy Maps

When it comes to fantasy stories, I quite enjoy making maps of my worlds. I made maps for my Legend & Lore series, posted both on live journal and deviantART, and I made a map for my Thralldom series, which hasn't been written yet.

I also hand-drew a map of the village Mist On the Moor takes place in, which you can see to the left here. It is a tiny village and the setting of the whole book.

I love maps in any form; hand drawn, photoshopped, landscape maps. I love to see how authors picture their world, how they've set it up, what they've done with it, how much more they have to play with in it.

This map for MOtM is a sketch. I will draw it bigger, not on a page in a notebook, and color it. I quite like it hand-drawn. When it comes to world maps, I like to make them in photoshop with my pen and tablet.

For the Legend & Lore and Thralldom maps I only drew the outline and roads and rivers with the tablet, and used some brushes I downloaded for trees and city marks. When I do the world map for MOtM, I will try to draw it all myself. I quite like the way I did trees in this sketch, it's better than using a single drawing of a tree, I think. What I'm going to be struggling with though is the mountains. I'm never ever happy with the mountains.

Usually, in famous fantasy mass-market books the maps are in one of the first pages of the books. That's cool to show it off like that before the story actually starts. What I thought was brilliant though, was the covers for Megan Derr's The Lost Gods series. The maps are a part of the cover and I simply LOVED all of those five covers. It gives me an insight to where the borders between the countries lies, what form the country has and the mountain chains.

These things interest me, and I squee in delight when an author has a map of his or her fantasy world. I squee in delight as I make my own maps. I don't know if anybody else cares about maps, but I do. I love making them too, and if I read a fantasy story without a map, I have this urge to make one. I have never actually done it, because I really have no idea about the surrounding land, but I sure want to sometimes!

Do you, as a reader, like to see maps of the fantasy world you read about? Do you, as an author, enjoy drawing maps of your world or commission someone to do it?